MC2 Researchers Win Best Paper Award at ACM CCS 2017

ACM CCS, held in 2017 from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3 in Dallas, Texas, is the flagship annual conference of the Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC) of the ACM. The event brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users from all over the world to explore cutting-edge ideas and results.

The paper proposes a simple and efficient framework for obtaining efficient constant-round protocols for two-party computation with security against malicious attackers.

Secure two-party computation is an important cryptographic primitive that enables two parties to compute a function of their inputs without the need to share their inputs with each other. It thus serves as a key tool for privacy-preserving computation.

Katz says their research focuses on secure-computation protocols that offer protection against malicious attackers who can corrupt parties running the protocol and cause them to behave arbitrarily. This is more challenging than the semi-honest setting considered in much prior work, where it is assumed that corrupted parties run the protocol honestly but only try to learn disallowed information after the fact.

The paper proposes a new paradigm for achieving malicious security that avoids using inefficient mechanisms that have appeared in previous work. Experiments show that the new protocol the researchers have developed is roughly an order of magnitude faster than the best prior work.